Collaboration and teamwork play an increasingly important role in workspace productivity. As noted by IDC, “To innovate and remain competitive, organizations need to provide the right tools, culture, and IT ecosystem for employees, business partners, suppliers, and customers to communicate and collaborate in real time and in context.”
The nature of enterprise collaboration is constantly changing with the arrival of new content management systems, such as the Evernote Service and software developed by Evernote Corporation of Redwood City, Calif., conferencing software and services brought by Cisco, Adobe, Microsoft, Zoho and other players; progress in enterprise social networks driven by IBM, Jive, Communispace, Telligent, Microsoft Yammer, Atlassian Confluence and other software; cloud, extranet and intranet services, etc. Market research suggests that new types of enterprise collaboration software are growing by 40% annually since 2014 and will continue growing at that pace at least until 2016.
Notwithstanding an overall growth of the enterprise collaboration solution market, different categories of software and services are expected to grow with different speed and some may even decline. Thus, according to some market surveys and reports, demand for unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) products that offer instant messaging, audio calls, online meetings and video conferencing, will start to drop overall in 2014. The reason is that, unlike the enterprise social software, these tools don't necessarily help employees discover peers outside of their work groups with desired expertise. Additionally, numerous studies suggest that free unbounded collaboration, not limited by pre-scheduled meetings and modeled after flexible collaboration patterns of social networks, will gradually become a key driver of workspace efficiency.
Growing workforce mobility is an important amplifier of a flexible and efficient collaboration style. Employees may access their work related information, together with shared group and business wide materials at any time and place, as long as their mobile devices are online and are securely connected to the appropriate information sources. Work flexibility is an important factor of the fast growth of mobile markets, which are expected to reach 10 billion Internet-connected mobile devices by 2016 in worldwide use, including around eight billion smartphones and tablets.
The next wave of mobile computing will see an exponential growth of wearable devices, including smart watches, activity trackers, wearable medical devices, smart glasses, wearable cameras, intelligent and adaptable clothing, etc. Analysts estimate that wrist-worn devices, such as smart watches and wristbands for activity tracking and medical purpose, will dominate the early wearables market. Some forecasts put the market share of wrist-worn wearables at 87% of all wearable shipments by year 2018. Top categories and models of smart watches, such as the Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Gear, Pebble and many other models are already shipping in increasing volumes and vendors are constantly improving their features, design and software integration capabilities.
Wearable devices, such as smart watches or smart glasses, are increasingly serving as instant information delivery vehicles; being constantly viewable by owners without any additional efforts and in hands free manner, they exceed even smartphones and tablets in the capacity to provide seamless information access. Therefore, wearable devices may serve as nearly perfect notification tools for hands free access to vital bits of information on various aspects of personal and business life and joint activities of the owner. However, methods and systems for productive use of wearable devices in enterprise collaboration haven't been extensively explored. One challenge facing productive use of such devices is their relatively small screen size, which limits information display capabilities on such devices and requires special methods of organization, grouping, display and manipulation of information, as well as optimal distribution of information between wearable devices and other mobile computing mechanisms, such as smartphones and tablets.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a productive use of wearable devices such as smart watches or smart glasses in enterprise collaboration solutions in conjunction with contemporary content management systems.